Friday, 23 January 2015

Death Stole My Dad - Chaos Ensemble (23 January 2015)

A 12 year old boy (Jordan Holloway) who has lost his
father in a plane crash runs away from home to play with his beloved Lego in
the deserted house down the street. Yet he is not alone. His Shadow (Daley
King) follows his every move and two siblings, guitar-wielding brother (Sam
Stopforth) and forthright sister (Violette Ayad), have broken into the house where
they offer to help bring the boy’s father back but only if he wins two out of
three games.

This is an odd mix of elements – part experimental, part
audience participation, part shadow play – that seeks to illuminate the grief
and trauma such a loss causes and the extent you would go to wish you could have
that person back.

The father’s death is well conveyed by the
Shadow using a Lego plane that crashes to suitable sound effects and lighting.
But then there is a long lull where I was a little disoriented as the boy soundlessly
explores this space by torchlight, seemingly playing with the Lego scattered about
and encountering what we later learn is his Shadow self. It’s only when the
siblings arrive that we begin to get any dialogue and a sense of who these
characters are. Even that is a little misleading as I never quite nailed down exactly
what the brother and sister represent – they begin as potential squatters but
then seem to have a more divine or supernatural aspect (depending on your point
of view).

The Shadow gets up to early mischief and is regarded as a
potential ghost before quite casually being outed as a shadow representation
with nary a second thought to the implications of this. It was just accepted.
There was great potential here and as someone in the audience said after, they
thought maybe the Shadow was in fact the boy’s dad which is an interesting
notion if he had been ‘there’ all along. So there needed to be more clarity as
to the ‘otherworldly’ elements.

The deal between the boy and the sister is also rife with
potential. The traumatised kid wants his dad back and latches onto, on the
surface, this outlandish prospect that could achieve such an outcome. But Death
chooses not to play Chess, instead Hangman, Twenty Questions and a game of Guess
Who I Am? This felt kind of awkward. A gentleman is picked from the audience
for the game of Hangman after the sister breaks the fourth wall and addresses
us as lost souls in some kind of limbo.

The other games are conducted between
the characters but it felt like there needed to either be a full-throated
commitment to drawing the audience into participating and, more importantly,
caring about the result, or perhaps not calling such obvious attention to our
presence. That tended to trade off the intimacy between the characters
especially in the tricky realm of grief and loss for a stab at a more kinetic energy. It fell a little flat, however, and the play did tend to bog down in “Why are you here?”, “We’re
here to help you?” repetition in the middle section that didn’t provide clear answers or narrative
momentum.

Ayad has a strong stage presence and does her best to
involve the audience. I wasn’t convinced, however, that she had ‘spoken’ to the
boy’s father – I was more inclined to believe it was all a con rather than an
actual ‘intervention’, supernatural or otherwise. Likewise, I wasn’t convinced
by Holloway’s portrayal as a 12 year old but they may be more to do with the
dialogue that felt better suited to an older teen. King gets to prowl around in
a jet black body suit and adds some levity but this shadow representation could
have embraced far more symbolic significance. Stopforth provides live music and
some laid-back coolness but at times I found it hard to understand his dialogue.

The premise that two mismatched ‘entities’ come to help a
boy lost in grief is solid but I wasn’t quite convinced of the execution here.

Death Stole My Dad is directed by Daley King and was devised
by and stars Violette Ayad, Jordan Holloway, Daley King and Sam Stopforth.
There are two more shows at the Blue Room Theatre on Saturday and Sunday the
24-25th of January as part of the Fringe World Festival.